Justin Timberlake: The Bachelor
Timberlake’s parents divorced when he was two; two years later, his mom, now forty-one, got remarried, to Paul Harless, a local banker, and together they raised what to them seemed like a very quiet child. “He always walked around with his head down, so you never saw anything but the top of his head,” says Lynn, a trim, attractive woman. She remembers her son as a “perfectionist [who] couldn’t stand anything on his shoes or his hands.” The two were, and are, exceptionally close. She came up with the name ‘NSync, and ever since his Mickey Mouse Club days, when it all got started, she’s been his co-manager. Lovingly enough, Timberlake has a tattoo on his back of an angel holding a banner that bears his mom’s initials.
One great thing about Timberlake is that, while he’s no longer all that quiet, he’s still as friendly and open as he must have been as a kid. Sure, much has changed since ‘NSync began cranking out their four albums; but much is the same, too. Timberlake has given no thought to deep-sixing ‘NSync; in fact, he and the guys are slated to start a new album in the fall. Plus, it’s not like his family has uprooted itself, moved to Los Angeles, bought Bentleys, gone in for plastic surgery and fallen out with one another, lawsuits resulting. They’ve all stayed put, which is why Timberlake has a home to go to. He’s comfortable here, resting up until he has to embark on a promo tour that will last until February, which will be followed by a club-date tour in the spring and an arena tour in the summer. So anything you want to talk to him about, you go right ahead. Pretty much, he’s game.
He says that when he listens to Eminem, it makes him want to “beat the shit out of somebody – and if you can give me a feeling like that with a song, man, that’s music,” though he thinks Eminem probably wouldn’t like Justified at all. He says that during his acne years, he was popularly known as Pizza Face and that, as a kid, he attended a nearby Baptist church with his folks but felt rejected by its frowning, judging elders and eventually found his own place with the Lord, no church required. “I can honestly say I am a Christian, but my spirituality has been developed on the road and is based on my experiences with God.” He claims to never have been a frequent masturbator. “Definitely not frequent. Actually, I’m not a huge fan of it. I mean, it is what it is, a safe haven, there when you need it, and I don’t feel guilty about it. But I always like to do everything at its best, and that just seems like settling, doesn’t it?”
He says, often and without prompting, that he loves his mother very much. The two spend lots of time together away from home, too. (In fact, the tabloids reported seeing Timberlake and his mom before Christmas at the club Lotus in New York, sharing a joint.) “We have a very special relationship,” he says. “She’s been my best friend since I figured out who I wanted to be. She’s great, and such a fun woman. She goes out with me and stays out later than I do. She’s always been there beside me, and I think that’s part of my problem with girls. You keep searching for somebody as good as your mother, and that’s a losing battle.”
It’s been quite some journey for him, of course, an improbable slue to fame that seems to have left him kissed by blessings in all areas of life except one. And that one follows him around like a bad dream.
A few months ago – after attending the Mike Tyson-Lennox Lewis dust-up in Memphis and buying himself a new $115,000 V-12 493-horsepower Mercedes S600 (“It’s pimp, so pimp!”) – Timberlake checked in to one of the luxe rooms at the Trump International Hotel and Tower in Manhattan, went to see the Lakers whomp the Nets at New Jersey’s Continental Airlines Arena and during the game had to deal with this older dude demanding to know if Timberlake was still seeing Spears, and what, exactly, was the story between them.
Timberlake squinted at him and said, “Do you realize how you sound right now? You’re a grown-ass man – and you want to know about a twenty-one-year-old’s so-called love life? Do you want me to repeat what you just said so you can know what an ass you sound like?”
The guy stuttered an apology.
“Don’t be sorry,” Timberlake said. “Just don’t say stupid shit like that.”
Being in the public eye, of course, stupid shit like this happens to Timberlake all the time, and he’s learned to deal with it.
“If I was like, ‘Well, people shouldn’t say anything,’ it would have driven me insane,” he said the next day in his hotel room. “But when you know people are going to say stupid shit, you don’t get emotional. I have to say something back, but I’m pretty clever, and I wait for the moment and then I make them feel dumb. By that time, the bodyguard has stepped in, and I’m on my way.”